Come at Bukhara from the west, and the first thing you see is the Ark, a vast mound of a fortress rising abruptly out of the flat Central Asian plain.

In the heart of the old city of Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, hidden behind a plain wall near the Umayyad Mosque, lies one of

Hidden behind high walls in the old medina of Marrakech, away from the noise and color of the famous souks, lies one of the most beautiful buildings in Morocco. The

Built for Morocco’s grand viziers, the sprawling Bahia Palace in Marrakech dazzles with zellij tilework, carved stucco, and painted cedar ceilings.

Once the palace of the beys of Tunis, the Bardo is now a national museum holding the world’s greatest collection of Roman mosaics.

On an island in the middle of the Chiemsee, the largest lake in Bavaria, rises the most ambitious and extravagant of all the palaces built by King Ludwig II, the

There is a French phrase that carries within it both a golden glow and a deep sadness: la Belle Époque, “the Beautiful Era.” It refers to the decades just before

Set upon a gentle slope in Vienna, with one palace at the top of a magnificent tiered garden and another at the bottom, the Belvedere is one of the most

In the summer of 1348 a ship put in at the little Dorset port of Melcombe, near modern Weymouth, and something stepped ashore with the sailors that would kill perhaps

A mound in central Bulgaria records over 3,000 years of continuous village life, and gives its name to the chronology of the Balkans.